Annenberg Institute Seeks To Find Voice in 1st Year

For Theodore R. Sizer, 1994 was the year of living dangerously. That
was the year the Brown University professor agreed to help advise the
philanthropist Walter H. Annenberg on where to spend most of his $500
million gift to public education.

The clamor and publicity surrounding the "Annenberg Challenge"
largely eclipsed the work of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform
here, which Mr. Sizer heads. And for the past year, the institute has
been struggling to find its voice.

"The institute is searching for where the silences are, where
there's a vacuum," Mr. Sizer said recently. "There's no point just
doing more of what very smart people have been doing."

Despite some common misperceptions, the institute does not make
grants to outside organizations or programs. It does not select sites
to participate in the Annenberg Challenge. And it is not responsible
for monitoring their performance.

It is a champion of school reform for the long haul--particularly
those reforms that take students and their work seriously.

'At Brown But Not of Brown'

Based here in Providence, the institute predates Mr. Annenberg's
bequest to education by a few months.

It began in October 1993 as the National Institute for School
Reform. Anonymous donors gave Brown University $5 million to create a
permanent, nonpartisan unit that could promote and reflect upon efforts
to rethink the nation's schools. Mr. Annenberg became the principal
benefactor in December 1993, when he donated $50 million to the
institute.

People here like to say that the institute is "at Brown but not of
Brown." Housed on the second floor of Davol Square, a converted
warehouse downhill from the campus, the institute strives for both a
physical and a psychological distance.

A separate board of overseers, appointed by Vartan Gregorian, the
university president, advises the institute on its work and reports
back to Mr. Gregorian.

The semiautonomous unit makes its own appointments and sets its own
salary scale. At the same time, many of its staff members teach part
time at Brown and supervise undergraduate theses.

On the 'Fault Line'

Most describe their work as lying on the "fault line" between
academia and the schools.

"It started on the assumption that there wasn't nearly enough work
that involved people who moved easily on both sides of theory and
practice," Mr. Sizer explained.

"We're looking not just to get the practitioners and researchers
working together," he said. "We're interested in attracting people to
work here who, in fact, are grounded in both worlds."

Two of the nation's best-known high school leaders serve as the
institute's first senior fellows: Deborah Meier, the former principal
of Central Park East Secondary School in New York City, and Dennis
Littky, the former principal of Thayer High School in Winchester,
N.H.

Its first full-time academic appointment is Susan F. Lusi, the
co-director of policy for the institute and a visiting assistant
professor at the A. Alfred Taubman Center for Public Policy and
American Institutions, here at Brown.

She is working on how to create a policy environment that supports
school-site flexibility and high standards.

An Evolving Relationship

But the fault line between theory and practice is not the only one
the institute straddles. It also is trying to define its relationship
with the Annenberg Challenge sites and the Coalition of Essential
Schools, a network of restructured high schools that Mr. Sizer launched
in 1984.

So far, both relationships are in flux.

After making substantial grants to groups in New York, Chicago, Los
Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Chattanooga, Tenn.--as well
as a small, initial grant to rural schools--the Annenberg Challenge has
about $133 million left to distribute of the $500 million pledged
nearly two years ago. (See Education Week, 6/14/95.)

Barbara Cervone, a special assistant to Mr. Gregorian, said most of
the money should be pledged by this fall. At that point, Mr.
Gregorian's pro bono work for the Annenberg Foundation--and by
extension, Mr. Sizer's--would largely end.

The Annenberg Institute is not responsible for working with or
monitoring the challenge sites. But it does have many personal and
professional ties that are likely to continue. Ms. Meier, for example,
is spending most of her time working with the New York group.

The Colossus

The institute's relationship to the Coalition of Essential Schools
is even more complex. If the institute is a toddler learning to walk,
the coalition is a growing, demanding adolescent. The 845 schools
affiliated with it now dwarf the institute in size.

"In our little shop, the coalition is the colossus," Mr. Sizer said.
"The evidence about the efficacy of its ideas is getting stronger by
the day, and none of us are about to walk away from that."

Almost all of the institute's core staff members earned their
reputations working with the coalition, from Ms. Meier to Joe McDonald,
the director of research. And while the institute does not plan to work
exclusively with coalition schools, it views them as exemplars.

Many of the institute's 15 research projects began under the
auspices of the coalition, including some nearing completion.

The "change project" studied a few schools over five years as they
attempted to implement coalition principles. The "exhibitions project"
studied 10 high schools that required students to demonstrate their
expertise to graduate.

One of the institute's most ambitious projects, "taking stock," will
try to assess the impact of school reform on students and create a set
of indicators that restructured schools could use with the public.

A "writing seminar," in collaboration with the National Writing
Project, will help teachers in changing schools give voice to their
experiences. A working party co-sponsored by the Educational Testing
Service is investigating new accountability designs for schools and
school districts.

Meanwhile, the coalition is moving more of its efforts out into the
field. A futures committee has spent the past year planning how to
decentralize its structure so that schools will work more closely with
regional centers.

'Hardest Nut To Crack'

Its previous experience with the coalition has strongly shaped the
institute's approach to supporting schools in the midst of change.

One of its earliest initiatives is the National School Reform
Faculty, which was started a few months ago. It will identify and
nurture leaders from reforming schools and provide a common meeting
ground for them.

The program provides innovative schools with an experienced coach
and about $2,000 in spending money to promote a new model of
professional development. In exchange, teams of teachers and
administrators at the schools agree to meet regularly during the school
day to critique each other's work and think through schoolwide reforms.
(See Education Week, 2/15/95.)

Of about 70 teams that will work with the institute over the next
year, the majority are coalition members. By next year, the institute
plans to reach out to a broader audience.

"Our dream is that schools will see this as an effective way to
provide ongoing professional development for their entire staff," said
Paula Evans, the director of professional development for the
institute, "and they will figure out ways to restructure their
schedules so that more and more people can participate."

Next month, the institute will launch a yearlong leadership academy
for about 45 principals drawn from both coalition and noncoalition
schools. "We're hoping that they'll become spokespeople for different
constructions of leadership within a school," Ms. Evans said.

"The thing that I think makes the institute different," she said,
"is that it is clearly focused on the innards of schools and
classrooms. This is what we know something about. And, in the end, this
is the hardest nut to crack."

Images of Good Schools

Another of the institute's projects is the Lead Schools Initiative,
directed by Robert McCarthy, the director of schools for the institute.
It will identify schools across a range of school-reform networks that
demonstrate a dramatically different and more effective approach to
teaching and learning. The project will study how such schools arose
and what sustains them--and provide the public with images of what they
look like.

"We believe that the nation needs examples to concretize the vision
of a good school," Mr. McCarthy argued. "Especially at the elementary
and middle school levels, there are already a lot of strong,
well-conceived school communities out there."

The institute will convene the schools to discuss common concerns
and share their experiences and lessons with others. In doing so, it
could help unite the work of a broad range of reform groups.

One of the institute's primary concerns is how to engage the public
in reform and provide it with richer portraits of schooling.

"One of the puzzlements we've had is how to re-create an audience
the size of which the movie 'A Town Torn Apart' got," Mr. Sizer said.
The television movie about Mr. Littky's Thayer High School was watched
by 27 million people.

"It's entertainment, but it's not only entertainment," Mr. Sizer
added. "It puts in front of people something other than the hugely
distorted and disrespectful view of schools, where the teachers are
fools, and the principals are bureaucrats, and the kids are consumed
merely by hormones and not by serious thinking about important
things."

As a senior fellow, Mr. Littky is spending part of his time thinking
about how to reach the public, particularly through multimedia.

He also is negotiating with an unidentified state in the Northeast
to help launch a "career" school that would combine the best of
vocational and academic education. The school would be tied to a
teleconferencing network that would enable teachers throughout the
state to view and discuss classroom practices and work through the
implications for their own schools.

The idea builds on an earlier program, "Here, Thayer, and
Everywhere," that began at Thayer High. That project, now relocated to
Brown as the "Educators' Guild," uses live, interactive television
workshops to enable schools to learn from each other. The two-hour
broadcasts include tapes of actual classrooms and discussion and
questions. This year, 850 sites registered to receive the program by
satellite.

'A Virtual Visit'

The institute is trying to capitalize on technology in other ways. A
digital-portfolio project, supported by the International Business
Machines Corporation, is helping schools organize student portfolios on
computer. A related project will develop school portfolios that provide
the public with a richer, more multifaceted image of schools beyond
just test scores.

"The idea," says David Niguidula, the technology-project manager for
the institute, "is that you could have some kind of virtual visit to
the school."

The institute also plans to produce an annual report to the nation
on school reform--which it now envisions as a multimedia campaign,
rather than a document that would sit on the shelf.

But the Annenberg Institute is moving cautiously: whether in
defining its agenda, reaching out to others, or making inroads into the
policy debate.

"You don't have to have a fast start, but the important thing is to
have a sound start," Mr. Sizer argued. "And these are tough issues. It
would be very easy to drift into the exceptionally conventional."

The "Scaling Up" series is underwritten by a grant from the Pew
Charitable Trusts.

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